RELIABILITY, VALIDITY, AND NORMATIVE DATA OF THE BECK-DEPRESSION-INVENTORY

This study analyzes the utility of the 1978 version of the Beck Depres sion Inventory (BDI; Beck, Rush, Shaw y Emery, 1979) as an instrument to identify subclinically depressive subjects in studies intended to v alidate models of depression. The data were obtained with a sample of 1393 university students. Reliability was high: a) the coefficient alp ha was 0.83 and b) test-retest correlations ranged from 0.60 to 0.72 f or three different subgroups of the total sample. The convergent valid ity of the BDI was also high: its correlation with the Zung Self-Ratin g Depression Scale (Zung, 1965) ranged from 0.68 to 0.89 for two diffe rent subgroups of the total sample. Results derived from other studies of our group (Sanz, 1991; Avia et al., 1995) revealed that the discri minant validities of the BDI with respect to different specific traits of anxiety (social, evaluation, interpersonal and test anxieties) wer e moderately low, with correlations ranging from 0.11 to 0.45. No age or sex differences on the BDI scores were found for this sample and, t herefore, norm scores were collapsed for the total sample of subjects.